Inside Health

After Shootings, Looking for Answers

By JODI WILGOREN; Reporting for this article was contributed by David Bernstein from Gurnee, Ill., Daniel I. Dorfman from Wisconsin, Neela Banerjee from Washington and Laurie Goodstein from New York.

Published: March 14, 2005

Two weeks ago, Terry Ratzmann stalked out of a meeting of his church, upset about something in the sermon. On Saturday, he stormed in late to the weekly service at the Sheraton hotel here and without a word began spraying the congregation with bullets.

The authorities remain unsure whether Mr. Ratzmann's rampage, which killed seven members of the Living Church of God, including the pastor, and ended in suicide, was a result of religious frustration. Church members said he had been suffering from depression and had just lost his job.

What they do know is that Mr. Ratzmann, 44, a computer programmer with a fondness for gardening who had no criminal record, ignored pleas from a friend to stop, instead popping a second magazine into his 9-millimeter handgun and firing 22 bullets in a minute or less.

''Nobody has told us anything from prior actions or prior contacts where they would have anticipated anything like this happening,'' Capt. Phil Horter of the Brookfield Police Department said at a news conference in this Milwaukee suburb on Sunday morning. ''At this point we're unable to determine if he had specific targets or if he just shot at random. At this time, we have no clear motive.''

The day after the worst mass killings in this state since 1914, when the chef at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's estate in Spring Green, killed seven people, the police were combing through encrypted files on three computers taken from the home where Mr. Ratzmann lived with his mother and sister. No suicide note was found. At the same time, neighbors were trying to reconcile the quiet man who brought them tomatoes and zucchini with the carnage wrought at the hotel. And church members here and across the country searched for meaning in the killings.

''Sometimes he was up and sometimes he was down,'' Kathleen Wollin, 66, a church member who was present Saturday, said of Mr. Ratzmann. ''When he was down, you couldn't talk to him.'' Several weeks ago, Ms. Wollin recalled, Mr. Ratzmann showed her pictures of a recent trip to Australia, ''and he was fine.'' But, she added, ''people tell me he wasn't talking lately.''

Sunday evening, two dozen people said the Lord's Prayer and held candles in the frigid night air in a vigil outside the Sheraton.

The Living Church of God was founded in the mid-1990's by Roderick C. Meredith after he was kicked out of one of the many groups that splintered from the Worldwide Church of God upon the death of its leader, Herbert W. Armstrong. It claims 7,000 members in 288 congregations. Many of them, like the one here, meet in hotels or other public spaces with itinerant pastors.

The Living Church holds that people from Northwest Europe are descendants of the Bible's 10 lost tribes of Israel, ''possessors of the birthright promises and accompanying blessings'' of Abraham's descendants, according to a statement of beliefs from its Web site. It observes the Sabbath on Saturday and counsels members to remain apart from the secular world by not participating in juries, politics or the military.

The church's view of history, which asserts that humankind is moving inexorably toward the ''end times,'' when the world will go through a series of cataclysms before the second coming of Christ, is not uncommon among evangelicals. While most evangelicals eschew specific predictions about ''end times,'' however, Dr. Meredith preached in a recent sermon broadcast internationally that the apocalypse was close, warning members to pay off credit-card debt and hoard savings in preparation for the United States' coming financial collapse.

Sherry Koonce, 47, said her brother, Glenn Diekmeier, a deacon in the church, was at the podium on Saturday warming people up for the pastor's sermon when Mr. Ratzmann burst through the back door.

''He did not see the gun, he didn't see that he had a gun, he heard the shot,'' Ms. Koonce said of her brother. ''When he heard the shooting stop, he got up and he saw what happened. He saw my dad and he went over by him. He looked and he wasn't moving. The paramedic checked and there was not a pulse.''

In addition to Ms. Koonce's father, Harold Diekmeier, 74, of Delafield, Wis., who had been a member of the church and its progenitors since 1972, the dead included the pastor, Randy L. Gregory, 51, and his 16-year-old son, James, of Gurnee, Ill.; Gloria Critari, 55, and Richard W. Reeves, 58, both of Cudahy, Wis.; Gerald A. Miller, 44, of Erin, Wis.; and Bart Oliver, 15, of Waukesha.

The pastor's wife, Marjean, 52, was injured, along with three others: Angel M. Varichak, 19; Matthew P. Kaulbach, 21; and a 10-year-old girl named Lindsay whose last name was not released.

At the Sheraton on Sunday afternoon, two of Bart Oliver's friends laid a white cardboard sign saying he would be missed, along with a poem, on a shrine that included eight wooden crosses, two dozen bouquets, stuffed animals and pictures.

''Do not stand at my grave and cry,'' read the poem, by Mary Frye, which the teenagers pulled off the Internet. ''I am not there. I did not die.''